Win7 won't boot after installing new HDD

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darkschmu

New Member
Hello all,

Brief description:
Win7 PC (specs to follow) works great until new SATA HDD is installed. Boots OK 1st time, new drive is formatted, data is copied over. All seems OK until the PC needs to be restarted.

At that point, Win7 does not boot. I can tell the sound & USB get loaded from the speaker static & webcam dot blinking, but a compressed series of lines show up at teh top of the screen as if it was trying to display a full screen in a 10-15 pixel high band. Unplug the new drive's SATA cable, boots great in a few seconds.

Tried
- different SATA cables,
- different SATA ports on the MB,
- taking other drives out,
- giving the new drive a different, known good power lead,
- swapping both data & power cables with a known good drive,
- re-seating the video card (since the pixel band seemed a weird video issue at 1st),
- tried a different, known good HDD
Nothing seems to be working. Seems as soon as a new SATA drive comes into the mix, bootup fails.

Specs:
MB ASUS M4N78 Pro v1.02g bios 1004 (will try updating this next) - Hybrid SLI disabled
CPU Athlon 2 X4 620
8G ram
PSU OCZ 600w
Video EVGA NVidia GTX 260
Boot drive WD 500G SATA

Secondary drives:
WD 250G SATA
CD-ROM IDE
Maxtor 120G IDE

HDDs that make bootup fail: WD 500G SATA
Seagate 320G SATA

All SATA drives share same power lead (3 connectors), as stated, I did try giving the 'problem' drives their own power lead.

Will try bios updates & see if the problem also occurs in safe mode, iirc it also failed when trying to 320g - but at least we'll know what driver it stumbles upon.

Any idea, anything I might be missing?
Thanks.
 
Are you trying to boot to the new drive or just using it as storage drive? If you copied data over from one drive to this one and expect it to boot, it won't. You actually need to clone drives, not just copy data over as there are hidden files that won't copy over.
 
johnb35 said:
Are you trying to boot to the new drive or just using it as storage drive?
Click to expand...

New drive is storage only, boot drive remains the same at all times. I must've forgot to emphasize that the boot drive & process always engages but fails to get all the way to a usable desktop or even display the Windows logo.

I have plugged the new drive back in just now to try booting to safe mode with it, and while hammering F8 to get the menu it booted correctly. Still have no idea why it gave me grief, or if it'll reboot correctly next time I need to restart it. I'd blame gremlins but would rather have something tangible or at the very least rational to lay this on...
 
Forgive me if you have said this in your first post, but have you tried plugging in a different drive to see if the computer boots up without the new drive plugged in? If it boots up with a different drive hooked up then the new drive is defective in some way, most likely electrical.
 
johnb35 said:
have you tried plugging in a different drive to see if the computer boots up without the new drive plugged in?
Click to expand...

Yes, the same problem happened a few weeks ago when I plugged in a Seagate 320 SATA, worked for 1st boot, put data on, rebooted, fail to boot. Went through the same gauntlet of tests and gave up, labeling that 320 as defective.

But then I tried the 320 in a 2nd PC (twin systems built at same time with same parts, let's call them systems A & B for clarity) and it worked great. Ran the Seatools tests on it, pristine. Made me think something might be wrong with system A. When it did the same trying to get the WD500 installed, I knew it couldn't be a coincidence.

So same behavior trying to plug in a Seagate 320 and a WD 500, both SATA. I don't have any other drives laying around to try out =/
 
My only other guesses would be bad psu, bad sata data cable, bad hardware on motherboard.
 
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